The fundraiser is in part so we can afford to use mturk.com to collect as many widely varied accents as possible, to classify students by which they seem to be speaking and score them in relation to the exemplar pronunciations from speakers with the same accents. If we don’t make the fundraiser goals, we will be stuck releasing much less content probably in only American Midwestern accents.

“If we make our funding goal we will have enough money to collect a statistically significant number of exemplar recordings in Standard American, Southern American, British, and Australian English accent pronunciations of each phrase in the database. That will allow us to correctly score any of those (including mixtures of them, which is odd but doesn’t cause problems in practice) while rejecting pronunciations that do not match one of those accents.

“If we don’t reach our funding goals, we will probably end up with content limited to Standard American English accents, and a lot less of it.

“Dialects are a bit trickier. We aren’t planning to support, for example, Scottish and British English dialects comprised of outright vocabulary variations (e.g. using “lorry” for “truck”) but anyone willing to code the alternative phonetic dictionary entries and collect sufficient pronunciation exemplar data (whether using Mechanical Turk or not) can certainly make a database compatible with other dialects, too.”

That’s before we get into vicious battles about scone vs scone or the southern nonsense that “scarf” rhymes with “giraffe”.

]]>By: BillStewart2012http://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/kickstart-a-free-reading-and-p.html#comment-1443968
Thu, 07 Jun 2012 05:30:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=165125#comment-1443968I’ve seen some of James’s previous work (Hi, James!), and it’s been really cool stuff, with a focus on giving people practical, friendly tools to improve their language skills. It’ll be interesting to see how far he can go with this if he can get his team funded.
]]>By: James Salsmanhttp://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/kickstart-a-free-reading-and-p.html#comment-1443785
Thu, 07 Jun 2012 01:19:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=165125#comment-1443785Thanks, Cory! I’m James Salsman, the project mentor/leader. Ask me anything!
]]>By: ZenMonkeyhttp://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/kickstart-a-free-reading-and-p.html#comment-1443782
Thu, 07 Jun 2012 01:12:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=165125#comment-1443782…except for deaf kids and some others with special needs. It does sound like a great project but my money goes to accessibility.
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